Emperor Palpatine was enormously strong in the Force, moreso than Vader IIRC. Physically Palpatine was frail, but the fact is that pretty much the only way Vader could actually kill Palpatine was by grabbing him by surprise and tossing him into the core of the Death Star, and Palpatine still mortally wounded Vader in the attempt.

EDIT: Vader may have actually possessed more raw power in the Force, after doing some research. But Palpatine's knowledge of the Force's power/schooling in the Force was overall superior. Like raw intellect versus honed book smarts, I guess.

That said, I suppose there's something to be said for seniority and chains of command.

A little bit of history first: the "casters" roles come from the role-playing games, which first were almost exclusively team games. The casters in their original design were never meant to be played alone. At all. They were only supposed to be support or dedicated characters who are added to a core team of fighters.

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Well i have to mention here (without the slightest intention of offense) that i completed Icewind Dale 2 with solo Sorcerer multiple times (including Heart of Fury mode) and he was one of the strongest "teams" to do that (i played through that game many many times, one of my favs )

A little bit of history first: the "casters" roles come from the role-playing games, which first were almost exclusively team games. The casters in their original design were never meant to be played alone. At all. They were only supposed to be support or dedicated characters who are added to a core team of fighters.

probably, but that does not mean this is still the case. There are many games in which you can solo any class, GD should be one of them (and to a large extent is, even though casters are somewhat weaker towards the end)

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I find the idea of playing ARPGs in solo pretty... strange

and yet a vast majority of players do exactly that, so this is most definitely not a good reason

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Second, some history again, but more technical this time: the developers of Grim Dawn are said to be among those who did Titan Quest. I can feel it in the game so I can believe it with no problem as far as I am concerned. What about Titan Quest? What about the casters? Well unless I did pretty bad with them, I found them to be pretty meaningless until level 40 or 50, where you could finally find the first items to reduce those damn cooldowns.

yes, casters used staffs as weapons and did attack with them, they also used pets and skills a lot more than meleers

Never had much problems with cooldowns

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So now I am reaching my conclusion: casters are not meant to be played by themselves or as themselves in Grim Dawn, they are only meant to be mixed with melee or ranged fighters.

this may be your conclusion, but it is completely wrong from my perspective

Ever combination is meant to be played solo, the focus of GD is SP after all.
Sure, MP makes things easier in general so you can better hide your weaknesses behind the others, but that is definitely not the design.

Casters are intended to be solo builds, just like all others.

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If you play Titan Quest or Grim Dawn, you quickly come to that idea that the game is mainly designed for those feelings and those mechanics that you have by playing melee fighters.

I never got that feeling

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Don't believe me?
Well just take a look at the gear available for your characters.
Where are your pure casters items?

caster armor, off-hands and weapons do exist, you know...

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One way or another, you will end up with a character handling a mace or a dagger or a pistol or some other physical weapon.
So where is your pure caster?

daggers are not physical weapons (talking about damage type here)

Yes, casters and ranged will frequently find themselves in melee range and casters sometimes use their weapons (or often, depending on build), but to me a caster is not limited to a build that never uses any weapon

Finished reading through the whole thread. Hesitated at first, as I've been waiting to see this thread mature a bit.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but no specific solutions were actually offered to this issue, no? I believe the closest anyone's come is with the idea of allowing CC to work on bosses. In my opinion, that is neither sufficient nor does it tackle a relevant problem. To me, bosses have never posed a threat to my casters, perhaps with the exception of Iron Maiden. Fabius, Moose, Vald, Zantarin, Benn, MQ, etc. are all easily kitable for any caster build. My casters die when they are overwhelmed by CC-immune enemies in large numbers; single targets, CC-immune or not, can trivially be manipulated.

One may argue that being unable to CC bosses cuts into a caster's clearspeeds because they need to spend so much time kiting, and one may be right...for now. Nine correctly observed that as content is made more difficult (which is an inevitability, by virtue of monster scaling into higher levels, which will happen with an increased levelcap), both attackers and casters need to kite a little bit. That should narrow the clearspeed margins a bit. That leaves only the defensive side of casters as a worry.

So answer this with specificity: how do you solve the defensive problems of casters? It cannot be through % damage reduction debuffs, because those are best for mitigating ambient damage for melee chars - whereas casters are more afraid of sudden damage spikes, potentially being oneshot. It cannot be through lifesteal, as that either homogenizes spells and/or favors AoE spells even more (as things like AAR grow further and further into obscurity). I don't have a solution to this situation, but I'd very much like one.

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Another oddity is the broken idea of 'caster armor'. More often than not, I find myself using 'caster armor' on fighter-type characters who solve their defenses through some other means and greatly value the highly-offensive stats of 'caster armor'. On the other hand, my casters generally opt toward heavy armor pieces as they need to do everything they can to bulk up. This is woefully perplexing, and likewise beyond my ability to solve.

My first problem is the importance of OA/DA, something that does not come naturally to a caster, unlike a meleer.

Second I probably would want some more skills like Mirror, or at least temporary invulnerability with mobility (unlike Blade Barrier), because not every caster is an Arcanist

Finally, energy use should be lowered, you should only rarely run out even when mostly ignoring it when deciding on your gear, ie Spirit should provide enough regen by itself, except for extreme cases, AAR and probably some other spammable skill still use too much energy

So answer this with specificity: how do you solve the defensive problems of casters? It cannot be through % damage reduction debuffs, because those are best for mitigating ambient damage for melee chars - whereas casters are more afraid of sudden damage spikes, potentially being oneshot. It cannot be through lifesteal, as that either homogenizes spells and/or favors AoE spells even more (as things like AAR grow further and further into obscurity). I don't have a solution to this situation, but I'd very much like one.

How to neutralize a spike 101. Make it so that an incoming damage spike basically can't do more than a % of your max health. The only issue I can see is keeping melee toons from just using this and being even BETTER at tanking than they were before. That might require some thought.

EDIT: Keeping in mind that HP values in Guild Wars were much, much lower than they are in Grim Dawn, some alteration to the basic concept of Protective Spirit may be necessary, but I think that the basic mechanic behind it is sound. It's just a matter of making sure it isn't abused by melee toons. That problem may be self-solving, however, because melee toons frequently have much higher HP than casters do. Whether it would be enough to see significantly less use from a spell like Protective Spirit... well, that's going to require some math, and I've never been good at math.

EDIT 2: To expand on just how effective Protective Spirit was, I'm going to tell you about what used to be one of my favorite off-the-wall builds in Guild Wars: the "55" monk. Basically a monk/insert class here (usually necromancer in my experience) that became nearly unkillable for most mobs by doing something very counterintuitive. 55 monks deliberately lowered their max hp to 55 (max hp values in GW were usually around 480 or so) using powerful skill runes, and used Protective Spirit (among other enchantments) to ensure that they never took more than ~5 HP of damage per shot - which they were able to regenerate using regenerative enchantments in the blink of an eye. Basically, it didn't MATTER that they had ridiculously low HP - as long as the monsters weren't capable of stripping enchantments, the 55 monk was nigh-on unkillable by monsters. This isn't to say that Protective Spirit is in any way overpowered - because it isn't. It was just incredibly smartly-designed, and the ingenuity of players should never be underestimated.

Many advantages are seen in this video. Not saying this character is better then any of the so called elite melee builds people are complaining about on here. But their is clearly some advantage to being a caster and they aren't near as bad as people are making them out to be.

My biggest issue with casters is that alot of the areas are too small and have annoying ass spots on the terrain that you can get stuck on while moving away from the enemies.

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Back Playing Path of Exile until the GD Expansion is released

I find it a bit funny that casters are seen as the problem. Caster builds are not bad. The issue come from the top of melee builds having the advantage over casters in every meaningful category. The common-sense solution is to just trim back the top-level of melee builds.